Making the Choice

The biggest problem I’ve had with the Democratic Party – and I’ve had that problem for years – is its slavish preoccupation with racial and gender preferences. When Jim Crow ruled the South, I was a New York kid preoccupied with Roy Rogers and the Mickey Mouse Club, but I’ve read enough to understand the stark dimension of that injustice and to be appalled by it.

Despite that, the issue with racial and gender preferences isn’t all that complicated. You either have equal opportunity or you have something else. And that something else can be anything else, standing with equal moral authority with any other arbitrary preference. The moment you abandon the concept of equal opportunity, the moment you’re no longer totally blind to race and gender, you abandon the moral high ground.

That’s the main reason I’m not a Democrat. I’m not a Republican because that party too often repels me with its “screw-everybody-but-me” mindset – its basic contention that no citizen of a democracy has any obligation to any other, its rejection of the entire concept of community, its rock-hard fantasy that yesterday was better than today and its laughable flights of fancy about what the U. S. Constitution actually says and means. They do that strictly as a justification for sheer selfishness.

So I begin every presidential election with a profound suspicion of each party and each candidate. I know from a lifetime of close-up experience with politicians that most of them are practical, moderate, calculating opportunists eager mainly for power, riches and attention. They’re perfectly willing to pander to anybody on any topic to attain those goals. They’re salespeople peddling themselves just like any Eighth Avenue hooker.

That’s why I always take a while to decide how I’ll use my vote. Party loyalty means nothing to me. My job as a citizen of a democracy is to do my best to pick the brightest, most capable person with the least likelihood of prostituting himself/herself on behalf of people who might do the country genuine harm.

From the start of this presidential race I’ve waited to see which guy that might be. To me, Barack Obama had the wrong idea on Afghanistan from the start and only lately seems to have smartened up on that. He inherited an immense economic disaster, but he has been a major disappointment in his approach to getting the economy moving properly again. He seemed to have other priorities. Sure, his stimulus stopped the bleeding created by the financial crisis, but it was too small and poorly structured so he could conform to the wishes of public employee unions, and he then turned his focus to other matters.

Jon Huntsman seemed the best the Republicans had to offer, but Mitt Romney also towered from the start over the rest of the GOP field. He seems smart, capable and eager to do well. The problem is that he’s the ultimate panderer. He has done more back flips than any circus acrobat. Romney ran hard right through the primaries and during the early months of his general election campaign. Now, in the campaign’s closing weeks, he’s suddenly moderate Mitt with a fuzzy plan to lower tax rates while doing way with deductions, but he’s no more specific than Obama on how to get the economy moving again. Neither guy has a decent plan fro the future.

And this is the best the system can produce? This is what we’re stuck with? The answer seems to be yes. So, a choice had to be made. After months of listening to what each guy had to say and watching these shallow campaigns unfold, I’ve now made it.

Ultimately, my decision was based not on my perceived superiority of one man over the other. They both strike me, despite their shortcomings, as first-class guys – able and generally well-intentioned. What drove my decision was the thinking and behavior of their backers.

I have for many months now been watching campaign ads, absorbing news and commentary and flipping on my computer every morning to be greeted by a long, really incredible string of political e-mails from friends and family. I’m now pretty much convinced that the right wing of the Republican Party at this point in history is composed of complete and utter lunatics — and I’m talking about people who seem to be clinically paranoid and just seething with ferocious, irrational rage and hatred. I hear from them daily in comments on my blog. (I imagine that I’ll hear from them even more now.) I hear from them in those truly wacko e-mails that I get from friends and family and that my wife, an enrolled Republican, passes along to me from her friends.

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I’m only moderately critical of Romney. He seems, despite his breathtaking flexibility in terms of political conviction, a thoroughly decent man whom I might not like personally – or Obama either, for that matter — but who’s worthy of enormous respect. The problem is that his victory also would give victory to all the astonishing crazies who really do believe, deep in their souls, that Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim Marxist appointed by the king of Saudi Arabia to take over American government so he can turn this country into an Islamic, communist state ruled by Sharia law.

It’s not merely morons who buy this demented stuff. People for whom I have deep affection and enormous personal regard actually swallow these lies as if they were revelations from God. This seems to be some sort of mass hysteria fed by an endless stream of blatant lies and the inability of otherwise bright people to sniff out those lies. The polls tell us that millions and millions of Americans are swept up in this insanity. A Romney win would only encourage the hopelessly gullible in their truly terrifying delusion and hinder rational Republicans in touch with reality in taking back their political party — as Jeb Bush, John Boehner and the others are likely to do if the Republicans lose this presidential election.

So, as deeply as I feel that Obama has been depressingly ineffective in fixing the wounded economy I’m voting for him because I’m afraid of seeing the crazies further empowered. Given his history of political prostitution, I have no reason to believe that Romney, in quest of a second term, would ever stand up to the nutball wing of his party. If the crazies get to take over the White House, as they took over the House of Representatives two years ago, I’ll actually begin to fret over the continued survival of this republic.

You really can’t let the inmates – or people who apparently should be inmates – grab control of the asylum. I’ll never forget a quote from Lincoln that I learned in elementary school: “America will never be destroyed from outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”

That said, my best guess is that Romney probably will win this thing. It’s my best judgment that an incumbent President who can’t get to 50 per cent in the polls with six per cent of the electorate unwilling to commit to him at this late date isn’t likely to get a second term.

If Mitt Romney and the merry mob of delusional crazies backing him do take over, though, it won’t be because I helped them do it.